Girlish Whimsy: Dinosaurs

This is adapted from a couple of old posts.

Here’s the thing about dinosaurs.

They should be imaginary. Everything else that cool from childhood turns out to be fake; fairies and dragons and hobbits and trolls and magic and unicorns and elves and so on.

Or they should be a lie, which only you find out later in school, and then you feel kind of sad and stupid for having loved them so naively. Like racist cowboys and commodified princesses and disease-ridden pirates. Maybe you learn to ironically embrace the myth of them, but the reality is always there, reminding you that nothing is ever wholly good.

Except dinosaurs! Because they were real, and you never learn that they weren’t as awesome as they appear. No bearded, pony-tailed high school sociology teacher ever sits on his desk and breaks the news that, despite what The Man would have you believe, they were really three feet tall and lived on tofu.

In fact, they are so cool that crazy people try to deny their existence. They claim it is because of the Bible, but really it is because they know that dinosaurs are so cool, they’re cooler than God himself (which is probably why God got rid of them and replaced them with humans).

Also note that, while the internet has ruined such formerly awesome things as zombies, vampires,* ninjas and Trogodor, dinosaurs have, if anything, been enhanced by internet attention.

The only way dinosaurs disappoint us is by no longer being alive. And that is mostly a problem for today's children, I think. Until their first trip to the natural history museum, they imagine that the dinosaurs there walking around in zoo-type habitats. The girl pictured above was wildly unimpressed to find the dinosaurs at the Field Museum didn't have their skin on, but when I was little, I thought of dinosaurs as skeletons first, and only later learned that they were once fully-fleshed creatures. I blame the Discovery Channel and their CGI dinosaur programing.

Luckily, there is a super-cool and adorable solution to this problem.